Upgrade Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 And So On

I am running Ubuntu 9.04, the update manager keeping saying that
"your distribution is not supported anymore".
but when I try to upgrade to the newer version, (it's 10.04.3 LTS),
after clicked upgrade button, it said "an upgrade from Jaunty to Lucid
is not supported with this tool". After some look around, looks like I
have to go through the following first:
1 - upgrade from 9.04 to 9.10, then
2 - upgrade from 9.10 to 10.04 LTS, then
3 - upgrade from 10.04 LTS to 10.10 and so on.

The problem is when I try upgrade from 9.04 to 9.10, what exactly do
I have to do? Please advise. Thank you.

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In answer to peters question, I have had the same problem also. I went
and did the normal upgrades fro 9.04 to 9.10 to 10.04 LTS. And with the
same results. same message. The one thing I have been doing is to
manually find updates that can be downloaded with out using the download
tool. I have tried upgrading to 11.04 and higher, but when i did none
of my installed hardware worked any longer. I had no wireless, no dial-up
modem no ethernet , nothing.I tried several fixes suggested to me from
community members, but was unable to get anything to download or work.
So that pc wound up back in windows xp pro again. I am not very adept at
Linux fixes or entering apts , So if you should find more answers to
the problem, please feel free to share them. I seriously don't want to
change all my systems back to windows again. Bill Huff sr

Ubuntu 9.04 is no longer supported. When you upgrade it needs to first
upgrade packages to the latest version on the 9.04 sources which are no
longer available. In short, you waited past when you could upgrade so that
option will not work.
You need to backup and do a fresh installation of either 11.04 or 10.04 LTS.
If you wait another ten days you can install 11.10.
LTS releases have three years of support and the rest have eighteen months.

not to sure if this will help but try upgrading from a c.d. instead of from the update manager. you might even be able to jump straight to 10.4. I don"t advise going any higher. had a lot of problems in the past with anything higher then 10.4. You can get a copy made form most small p.c. fix it shops for around ten bucks

Hi Roy,
If I need a fresh installation of either 11.04 or 10.04 LTS, do I need to
un-install my current Ubuntu first? It was installed on top of Vista a few years
ago, that means I have to reload Vista as well? Would be nice if you have
instructions on how to un-install it. Thank you. -Peter

I also would like to know if there is a way to upgrade when you skip releases. It seems to me that this is a real shortcoming of Ubuntu (and its variants). Also the problem of upgrading to the next release only to find some application doesn't work anymore and being able to "downgrade back: (I ran into this because the upgrade also upgraded Python and the app I was using had dependencies on the earlier version). I had to do a complete re-install to get back to where I was. I have also learned to stay with the LTS releases if possible, unless there is something really compelling to upgrade. Recently, I had to re-install 10.04 and will probably stay with it for quite a while (forever?) as the rumblings about Unity and Gnome 3 have turned me off at this time - plus trying the Live CDs didn't impress me.

Wubi installs also need to be more flexible (also allow expanding and/or adding virtual disks). Please no grief about dual-booting, I choose not to do it on one lap-top for specific reasons (and does not have the resources to set up Virtual Box).

I recently bought an external (terabyte) HD to save (clone) my installs. I did try to back up Windows and Ubuntu installs, using a live CD and found that it won't copy some "0" length files.

OS upgrades in general can be troublesome and even more so with multiple upgrades! Hassle that it is, a clean install is always the better option in the long run with the LTS version of Ubuntu being preferable for the main working PC - there's no going back from a failed update and that's a major hassle if this is the only PC you've got. We all should have a disaster recovery plan but I wonder how many of us do ?

I disagree that it is a shortcoming given that other OSes do not offer free
upgrades and even when you pay for a new version of Windows or OS/X you get
no guarantees that everything will work as before. Given that a new version
of Ubuntu comes out every six months and they offer two upgrade paths,
regular and LTS, they are being more than fair. If users choose to ignore
warnings to upgrade and ignore expiration dates they are free to do so, but
there are consequences.

Users who do not like to upgrade should use LTS (long term support) which
comes out in April of even numbered years and it is good for three years and
and additional two years for the server edition. You can upgrade from LTS to
LTS and thereby skip versions in between. If you switch to a regular release
at anytime you change your upgrade path to a six month cycle.

If you upgrade every six months you can maximize chances of success by
sticking to the standard sources. If you use PPAs or install from outside
sources then these.can cause an upgrade failure.

Note that Ubuntu and its family are one of the few that offer upgrades at
all. There is no tool even in Mint which is based on Ubuntu. Most distros
discourage it.

An alternative would be to switch to a rolling release model such as aptosid
or LMDE. These never expire or need upgrades but are usually harder to set
up. Debian and Arch are the best but are not newbie friendly.

Not to put a fine point on it, but I've had virtually no problems with 11.04. I will say that I did not do 11.04 as an 'upgrade' from 10.04 and 10.10, but rather as a 'clean' install. 'Upgrade' installs seem to be the problem here as they frequently are also in Windows. Anyone having experience in both methods would probably concur. As an install method, upgrades generally (in my experience) leave things out, put things in the wrong places, do not uninstall or re-install everything they should, and often take almost as much time as a fresh image.

I totally agree that upgrading from 11.04 to 11.10 resulted in numerous crashes and lock-ups of my system, ergo back to 11.04. OK, upgrades that are not yet RC's are often subject to crashes, but 11.10 seemed to me to be the worst I've had so far. This is not to condemn 11.10 but rather to state what happened in the hope that the programmers working on 11.10 will be able to work these issues out successfully. Of all the Linux distros I've tried, I prefer Ubuntu for the ease of usage as well as for the sturdiness of the system. I've tried many distros - some really solid and quick, others not so. Ubuntu may not be everyone's favorite but I intend to keep using it. It certainly works a lot better in my system than OpenSUSE or Fedora.

As far as trying to 'upgrade when you skip releases', I experienced multiple problems doing that which led to my preference for doing 'clean' installs. Boiling it down, we all have our own methods and preferences. What worked on my system may cause data loss in another or leave an un-bootable brick in it's place.

It is my preferred method as well. I have a separate home partition which is
now six years old and I have not lost any data yet (touch wood). There are
no certainties when out comes to computers in my experience. I have never
missed a release and often reinstall within a release cycle and have
switched distros at least twice using the same home.
I have also learned to back up my sources list and apt installed package
list, so reinstallation is a piece of cake.

Whenever I'm faced with an OS upgrade, I do a clean install every time. I do this for both Linux and Windows. For me, it accomplishes two things:

One, it makes the upgrade as painless as possible, as it's easier for me to back up and restore user profiles and reinstall applications than it is for me to chase down mystery gremlins caused by deep-seated compatibility issues. This is a lesson I learned the hard way with Windows 9x/ME. You can probably get away with doing an upgrade-in-place if the base kernel hasn't changed, such as between Win98 and ME, or Win2k and XP; but even then, it's iffy. With Linux distribution upgrades, there is almost always a base kernel change involved.

Second, a clean install gives me a chance to get rid of months or years of cruft that has accumulated since the last install - things that build up and cause little annoyances or minor instability along the way. It also cleans away any workarounds I've performed - workarounds for problems that may not exist in the next upgrade. For example, since Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04), I have had to work around Pulseaudio and OpenAL issues; but each new upgrade since Hardy solved problems here and there that I no longer needed to work around, rendering my "fixes" obsolete. Today, I no longer need any of them because, for me, Pulseaudio and OpenAL work perfectly, and my fixes and tweaks would actually break things. By doing a clean install, I am forced to re-evaluate my workarounds and tweaks.

One of the strengths of Linux is its diversity. This is true even for OS upgrades. For those who like to live on the edge and don't mind frequent reinstallation, there is a new Ubuntu release every six months. Those who REALLY like living on the bleeding edge can also enable the "backport" and "proposed" repositories. There are also upgrade paths for those who value stability above staying up to date, such as Ubuntu's LTS cycle. Instead of doing a clean install every six months, you can limit it to every two years. And for those who hate doing upgrades at all, there are various Debian variants out there that do rolling updates. There's really no "wrong" way to do any of this; the only thing I don't recommend is doing an upgrade-in-place if you've modified your existing installation in any way, such as adding non-Canonical PPAs.

I didn't use (or try, for that matter) a Home partition. No particular reason. You seem to have had a run of really good service using that method which makes me think I'll try it as well. My only question now is whether I can add a Home partition to my existing installation without clobbering any of my data. If I have to re-install everything ..well, it wouldn't be a first. I suppose I could simply 'image' the install I have and perhaps lay it down into the new Home partition. Haven't tried doing that either. I've seen other postings regarding partitioning 'schemes' that used your method with the results being largely positive.

To my knowledge you shouldn't have top re-install Vista. What type of Ubuntu install did you do? Dual boot, Wubi (in a Windows directory) or into a virtual machine using Virtual Box, VM Ware or other VM)? I have not done a dual boot install myself, but I seem to recall reading that there is an order when installing Ubuntu in its own partition under Vista (and Windows 7?).

Roy, how about a tutorial on how you set up a home partition and how you "re-install" without spending days re-installing apps from SPM and/or Software Center packages. I tried the "dpkg and apt-get, but things did not work out well. I had to do a complete reinstall that took a few days getting things back to where I wanted them.

Truly, I'm not sure if it was ever an issue. I have some old habits left over from my Windows days, namely using a C:, D: and Page file type of layout on separate hard disks. In that respect, you could think of D: as the equivalent of a Home partition since I used C: only for Windows, programs and apps. With my Linux installs, I never really stored any great amount of data on-board, preferring to use external backup, no doubt due to the propensity of Windows to get infected thru-out. When 11.10 is released as a full distro (I understand this happens in about two weeks?) I'll re-install with a Home partition included. That would seem to be more useful and simpler than always having to use USB drives for storage. It might even explain why GParted identifies my SWAP partition as 'Unknown'.

As to moving a Home partition to a new install, here are some links you may find useful:

It is easier to set up a separate home partition at installation time than
to try to move an established one without re-installing. Both are possible
and not too hard. I have had success with each, but it has been awhile
because as I say I have had this one for many years. There are excellent
tutorials online. The biggest problem with Googling for help with Linux is
that much of the information that you will be find will be either dated or
involve lots of command line. I will add my two cents.

First thing to do is to back up all data that is essential before altering
partitions. This includes all hidden files. See below. If something can go
wrong it will. It is part of the learning curve. :)

The reason that you're using the live CD is that it works from RAM on
unmounted partitions. Using a partition editor on a mounted partition is a
recipe for disaster. (It can be done from a terminal if you know what you
are doing.)

From the live CD go to the Partition Editor or Gparted, likely in System
Administration menu. If it is not installed then install it to RAM using
apt-get or Synaptic. (sudo apt-get install gparted)

First thing to do is to shrink (resize) the partition to create space for
the new one. If you are already dual booting then you will likely have sda1
for Windows and sda2 for Ubuntu. Look at the size and decide which one to
shrink. Your home should be much larger than the root partition. Root can be
8 GBs and you probably won't need more than 12 GBs. Mine is larger because I
have a 1 TB HD and I have everything but the kitchen sink installed. I think
that it is 25 GBs and I am using less than half that. I make allowance for
video editing which uses the tmp folder and can create large files. They do
not stay there for long but you do not want to run out of room on your root
partition. Been there. Done that. It isn't pretty. My home is 300 GBs, but
you can get by with much less. Most of my space is used up in storing music,
ebooks and pictures. Depending on your habits you can have a home twice the
size of your root or less.

You should have three partitions for Linux. Root plus home and swap. Total
swap on all drives should not exceed twice your RAM. If you have Windows
then it will be four partitions in all. If you shrink Windows it will create
free space, after it. Make sure that it is after and not before. Windows
likes to be number one. :) The way the partition editor works it allows you
to make changes and review them then you have to hit Apply. You can make
more than one change at once, but I like to make sure before I proceed, so
do one at a time. Like in cutting wood when you measure twice and cut once,
you check twice before you hit Apply (My philosophy).

Once you have free space it will say Unallocated. You then click on that in
the ribbon at the top (it will be grey and say Unallocated or maybe Empty?)
and use the menu or right click on it to create a new partition. If you are
using swap (you only need one on your whole system for all distros; more
than that can slow you down significantly) and don't have one then you
create two partitions, a small one for Swap and a large one for home. For
swap you tell it that it is Swap where it says file system. For home I use
ext4, but you can use ext2, 3, Reiser or anything that you like. The default
for most distros is ext4. Check and Apply. A typical system will now be
sda1, sda2 which will be your original two partitions and the new ones will
be sda3 and sda4 (one for home and swap and will vary depending on the order
you create them in). But things can get significantly more complicated. You
can use extended partitions instead of primary partitions. You can have only
four primary partitions. But If you make an extended partition you can
create more partitions inside. I am not going to go into that now.

The previous steps will be the same procedure whether you are starting fresh
with a clean install or moving home to its own partition. Now things will
change.

Fresh installation:

If you are starting new then you can use you installation media to install.

However (and it is a big one) a fresh installation will destroy your old
home because it will want to format the partition. So you will want to have
backed things up. Check twice that your backup is intact including the
hidden files (see below). In the installation choose the last option, which
varies in its wording, but it means to choose a manual installation. ALWAYS
opt for this in the future. Anything else means that it could destroy your
home or Windows.

You need to know three things here. You need to know about formats (file
systems) and mount points plus whether you want it to be encrypted. The file
system is up to you but ext4 is tried and true. BTFS and newer file systems
have benefits but it is harder to get support because fewer people use them
and they can still be flaky. I use right click. You right click on the
partition where you want for root. It will be the one that is smaller than
home but larger than swap. Choose to use it. Choose the file system and
check to format it as ext4 or whatever. Choose the mount point as / which
means root. Click on where you want home in the same way. Choose to use it.
Choose the file system and here is the most important thing. Only format the
first time (when there is no data yet). In the future follow this step but
make sure that it is not set to format. You now choose the mount point for
home as /home. Click on swap partition (smallest) and choose swap. Click OK
or whatever it says.

Look carefully at your choices before you proceed. It will show the
partitions that will be formatted. It should only be checked for / and not
/home (except the first time). Click Apply and it will create root and home.
Ubuntu will now begin installing and doing updates while you choose a user
name and password and whether to encrypt and auto login. I encrypt and do
not auto login. Older versions of Ubuntu (10.10 and previous) will not begin
installing until after this step. Distros such as Fedora do not have this
step until after you install and reboot.

Final step is to reboot and copy your backed up data to the new home. Make
sure your back up includes hidden folders (see below).

Not reinstalling Approach:

If you did not install but are moving home and keeping your old root still
backup before starting just in case and remember to get your hidden files
and folder.

I said moving home is trickier to my way of thinking but I like installing
(twisted I know) because installing is so straight forward and if you do a
fresh installation over an upgrade every six months it is good practice. You
skip all of the installation things mentioned above. After repartitioning
you can then begin copying all files from old home to new home. The easiest
way to do this is to copy (not move) the whole home folder which is your
user name to the new partition. Alternatively you can create a folder with
your user name and work within the home user folder copying only what you
want. You can do this from the Live CD or after reboot and work from your
installed installation. If you move them instead of copy them then you may
not be able to login afterwards unless you are familiar with the procedure.
I do it but I like to live on the edge. I also no longer backup despite all
my cautionary talk above. I DO check twice though.

The last step will be to go to users and groups in the system menu and
change the location of your home from old to new. Create some difference
between the two such as create a file or delete one and then log out and
back in. See if you are in the new or old. If it did not work then you may
have to do some extra work. There are older methods from the commandline and
some good tutorials on this. Let's here some commandline love. :)

Once you are sure that the new home is working and all of your files are
intact you can delete the old home, but you need to exercise some caution to
make sure that you are deleting the right one. Note after resizing a
partition it will run a disk check on next boot.

Hidden folders begin with a dot and hold all of your settings such as you
bookmarks, mailboxes, address books etc. They are usually invisible so you
can miss them depending on how you copy. To see hidden files and folders you
press Ctrl+H in Nautilus or Alt+. in Dolphin (KDE) or go to the menu in each
under View. You should enable this before you copy unless you copy your
whole home folder at once which will be your user name. My home folder is
roy.

It sounds complicated but if you keep your head about you it is quite safe
and satisfying. It makes life simpler in the long run. Others may have some
shortcuts or a different approach. As I said at the beginning it has been
awhile since I had to do this. The part in know best is in re-installing and
not so much moving home without re-installing. I reinstall ever couple of
months but do NOT format home. I go through the installation procedure above
and always choose the manual installation option and choose my old home
partition with its file system the same (ext4, although I have changed the
format at varying times from ext 3 to 4 for example) and the mount point is
/home. This is the same as I would do for the first time. The trick is to
NEVER format the home (/home) but to ALWAYS format root ( /). It is
unnecessary to format swap.

The beta is less buggy than it was, but it has had its moments of occasional
application crashes in the past. It is stable in that it does not lock up or
the desktop environment crash. I got a whole bunch of upgrades today
including a kernel upgrade. I have not rebooted or tested Unity or GNOME 3
since. I am in KDE and things are fine. Once the RC is out things are pretty
much finalised and you can get a jump on the downloads. The servers are slow
at final release time. It is a good idea to use torrents at release time. I
find it faster because there is much sharing. If you download around Tuesday
next week and do upgrades for the rest of the week them you should have the
equivalent of the ISO released on the 13th.

Keep an eye out at Distrowatch.com for the latest developments. I think that
this is an exciting release. Unity is maturing nicely and you can see lots
of potential and where Ubuntu is headed (the right direction IMO). GNOME has
some new features and also shows potential and KDE is fantastic the way it
is.

BTW, I read a recent Windows article criticising Microsoft for its love of
the Start button saying it was time to do away with it. Unity and GNOME (and
OS/X Lion) have already done away with it. Perhaps they are just ahead of
their time and users need to look at the big picture and give Unity and
GNOME 3 a chance. That is why I am excited about the new release. We have
more choice than ever. You can even install the gnome-panel and get a
classic look if that is your thing. Since it is not mine, I use KDE and
switch to Unity for change.

Ah, the Start button. I never quite understood why it wasn't called 'On/Off' or for that matter, 'Boot'. A simple graphic would have done as well. I can't wait to see what Microsoft comes up with as a replacement, should that ever happen in my lifetime :). Perhaps the iso of 11.10 that I downloaded was a bit buggy due to the time at which I got it, being about two weeks ago. Why wait, well, yeah, I suppose I could try it again. I just need to Ghost my PC before I do that. Re-loads take the better part of four to six hours to get things the way I like them. Besides, 11.04 works quite well here and I'm mostly from the school of "If it ain't broke...".

Just curious, how have you been able to avoid lock-ups on your PC? Perhaps your partitioning scheme? Video card? I admit, I was completely stumped as to why my machine responded the way it did even after having used other GParted configs and dutifully applying updates. The lock-ups I was getting seemed to be video memory related, at least from a visual standpoint. Sort of the way a bad webpage causes Internet Explorer to "white-out" and seize the system.

As to the Start button, it came from an online journal and not MS. Although
believe Metro in W8 is a step in that direction. I have only seen video and
screen shots.

I think you may be right about when you got your ISO. Ubuntu is under rapid
development and there are many daily updates. Two weeks is a long time as
lots of finishing touches go in near the end and bug squashing is a
priority.

My box is quite ordinary. It is an HP quad core with 6 GBs of RAM and an ATI
card. It is severely partitioned and I can troubleshoot well, but I don't
claim any special skills. I have seen lots and broken my system more times
than I care to remember. That is the way that I have learned - the school of
necessity.
I am fairly daring and will take foolish risks. Some pay off, most don't.

We both went to the same school. My system is a Compaq with an Athlon 64, 4 Gb RAM and an ATI card as well. All this time I had thought Microsoft responsible for that strange naming convention. I downloaded the Beta 2 of 11.10 last night. Depending on how well I make the coffee in the morning, I'll either load it in or wait for the final release. Risk taking is part and parcel of the I/T fields...you try the newest thing and it works or it doesn't, but that's the best way to find the answers and gain pratical experience.

Thanks for taking the time here. I agree,Google does need to do a bit of house cleaning. I had thought that setting up the extra partition was possible but after reading this, I decided to go with my first choice and do a clean install. I've had some aggravating experiences re-sizing partitions, and I don't currently have a Tb-sized disk to play with (only 320Gb). I always thought that the Root partition would have to be the Boot partition and the mount point as well..? Currently, GParted reports my boot partition as NTFS, even tho I'm using GRUB.

Thanks for the steps to separate /home on to it's own partition. Just
what I needed prior to doing a clean install of 10.10.

I took the second path (without the upgrade), and really own had one
issue - I had to edit the /etc/fstab file to mount the partition at startup.

Well with that sorted out I seem to have a weirder problem. Despite
moving my home folder to another partition and deleting the old folder,
which I had renamed old_home, my system has started telling me the root
drive is nearly out of space. Well, I had reduced the partition to about
23GB, but that should leave plenty of space. In fact if I select all
folders in 'File System' using nautilus and check properties it reports
about 6GB. If I include the new /home folder it is reporting about 21GB.
The new /home folder is definitely on the new partition (it tells me it
has 45GB free space).

I'm pretty new to Linux and cannot figure out what is happening. Does
the system count the files on mounted drives as part of the drive on
which it is mounted? Is there some re-initialising of the disk required
or...?

You can clean out your root. All of the packages that you install are cached
and lots of other things, too. There are utilities that specialize in this
or you can use the commandline. I love it that you have choice.

Sorry about the graphic not showing. Must learn how to do that! Meanwhile I
have gone ahead and done a clean install of 11.10 B2 and it has reclaimed my
disk space. Still not sure what was going on before. Thanks for your help.